The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Pressing On

    See now some people are just willful about not getting it. Matt Taibbi—the man who is now best known as the author of the world’ most tasteless dead pope jokes—is not happy until he has found a pile of his own shit to goosestep through. In yesterday’s New York Press, he offers his long and ultimately pointless critical attack on Tom Friedman. It comes down to this, folks: Friedman commits the heinous transgression of mixing his metaphors.

    For example, Taibbi writes:

    “(Quoting Friedman) I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

    “Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.”


    Only a man desperate to take a contrarian position will waste a thousand words on such trivialities, willfully ignoring the point—if there is one in this simple, throwaway, scene-setting passage. (Nit-picking off-topic metaphors: There is only one level lower on the totem pole of criticism—carping about typos on blogs.) So Friedman isn’t the world’s greatest stylist—does anyone on the planet, other than Matt Taibbi, care that Friedman is NOT James Joyce or Gustav Flaubert?

    Now there are many good reasons to disagree with Friedman, and reasons to point out his most glaring blind spot— his unexamined assumptions about globalism. (He has never adequately defended his First Principle—why the slow encroachment of internationalism, i.e. Western style democracy, capitalism, and conspicuous consumerism, is necessarily a good thing for all people in all places.)

    Taibbi has the opposite problem that he identifies in Friedman: He is all style and no heart, and most disturbingly of all, no reporting. (If he can accuse Friedman of being a lousy stylist, then we can accuse him of being a bedsit reporter.)

    Taibibi writes:


    “(Quoting Friedman, again) The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

    “How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

    Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

    To which we can only answer: one thousand words of this, folks. Draw your own conclusions about the sacred and the profane.

  • Rockin' The Teflon Dump

    The guy who pumps the music through the Metrodome speakers during Twins games is a fellow by the name of Kevin Dutcher. I have no idea how much attention people pay to that sort of thing during baseball games, but I started noticing a few years ago that the selection of tunes at the Dome was surprisingly eclectic and hip compared to any other baseball stadium I’ve visited. I love the ballpark organ as much as anyone, and I’ll admit there are times when I still get nostalgic for the days at the old Met when Ronnie Newman provided the bulk of the musical entertainment.

    Newman died a couple years ago, but he still held down his post in the Dome’s organ loft pretty much right to the end, and though it sometimes gets lost in all the other stuff that now goes on during a baseball game the Twins did hire a replacement. These days, though, the bulk of the in-game music comes from Dutcher’s perch above the press box behind home plate.

    Whenever I ask people if they notice the music during Twins games all anyone seems to recall is that wretched anthem of peckerwood patriotism that turned the seventh-inning stretch into an interlude of absolute brain-squeezing torture. I don’t even remember the faux-sodbuster’s name who warbles the damn thing (repression can be a wonderful survival tool), but I can assure you that he’s basically ripping off the incomparable C.S. Lewis, Jr. from the late, great Mr. Show.

    If you aren’t paying attention, however, you’re missing some wonderful music. In the last year I’ve heard, among others, the Replacements, Outkast, Modest Mouse, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, Kiss, Chuck Berry, The Who, Devo, Weezer, the White Stripes, and Bush. That’s the sort of play list that’s earning MPR’s new The Current so much adoration (and cash). Dutcher, meanwhile, works in almost complete anonymity, and provides his own tunes to boot.

    Each member of the Twins has the opportunity to select what Dutcher calls their “walk-up music.” These are the songs that get played when a player’s name is announced in the on-deck circle. Some guys are apparently very picky; others don’t give a rat’s ass. Jacque Jones, for instance, provides Dutcher with a number of selections, and likes to mix things up from time to time. For the players who don’t have any particular preference Dutcher chooses something he thinks seems appropriate. Last season he picked Joe Mauer’s music, alternating Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” and the White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button,” the latter, Dutcher said, because he figured “a twenty-one-year-old kid should like the White Stripes.”

    I’ll run down the songs for this year’s starting line-up, and include some selections apparently beloved by former Twins, but first I’d like to make a personal plea to Ron Gardenhire: Gardie, please call your slumping third baseman into your office immediately and discuss with him what strikes me as a hugely inappropriate and emasculating song choice (OutKast’s “Behold A Lady”). This reminds me of the days when Dodger pitcher Robinson Checo’s appearances would be heralded by the playing of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” This, though, seems much, much worse.

    Here’s the line-up:

    Shannon Stewart: Last year Stewart used Usher’s “Yeah.” This season his walk-up music is an unnamed hip-hop instrumental that he provided to Dutcher.

    Jason Bartlett    : LCD Soundsystem, “Daft Punk is Playing at My House.” (Dutcher’s selection.)

    Joe Mauer: The Game, “How We Do.” (Never heard of it.)

    Justin Morneau: AC/DC, “Back in Black.” (Same as last year.)

    Torii Hunter: Bonecrusher, “Never Scared.” (Same as last year.)

    Jacque Jones: The Game, “Where I’m From.” Juvenile, “Bounce Back.” T.I., “Bring ‘Em Out.” (Dutcher: “Jacque likes variety and is very specific about his music.”)

    Lew Ford: Tree 63, “Treasure.” (A Christian rock song, if I’m not mistaken.)

    Michael Cuddyer: OutKast, “Behold A Lady.” (See above. Suggested inappropriate alternates: “Three Times A Lady,” “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” “Pretty Woman,” and “Lady Sings the Blues.”)

    Luis Rivas: Petey Pablo, “Freek-A-Leek.” (Dutcher’s selection. Suggested nicknames for Rivas: Petey Pablo and Freek-A-Leek.)

    Matthew LeCroy: Charlie Daniels Band, “South’s Gonna Do It Again.”

    You might recall that jaunty little Latin number that accompanied Cristian Guzman to the plate during his last several years here. For those who might wish to recreate those wonderful memories in the privacy of their own homes, the song is called “Fiesta Mora,” by Alabina, and is from a CD called “Sexy Latin Beats.”

    Corey Koskie’s song was Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and, sometimes, a tune called “Joy” by a Christian rock group whose name Dutcher did not recall. Eddie Guardado, of course, took the mound to AC/DC’s booming “Thunderstruck.” Joe Nathan’s warm-up music features “Stand Up and Shout,” by the fictional band Steel Dragon (vocals by Sammy Hagar) from the “Rock Star” soundtrack, mashed with Big Head Todd’s version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom.”

    There you have it. Somebody please burn me a CD of this schizoid mix so I can drive my wife bananas on road trips. I’d also be delighted to entertain suggestions for alternate selections –perhaps something you think might be more appropriate– for any of the above named players. Or any players, period, I guess. What would Ted Williams’ walk-up music be, I wonder? What was Ron Coomer’s? What should it have been?

    Oh, lord, the possibilities are endless.

  • Sightings

    If you’re interested in hearing more inside dope on this month’s cover story about the man who caught Zacarias Moussaoui, we encourage you to tune in to CNN tomorrow at 12:30 p.m.

    Our writer, Dean Staley, will be interviewed about the story—just in time for the rumored acceptance of Moussaoui’s guilty plea, also scheduled for tomorrow.

  • Poacher & Poached: Ugly Gossip Edition

    Imitation is the highest form of flattery, they say, so we’re not all that upset that one of our esteemed competitors has appropriated an idea of ours (which we ourselves had appropriated). This kind of thing happens periodically—it is one of the conventions of publishing a periodical. Depending on your frequency, the institutional memory is wiped clean daily, weekly, or monthly. The deep desire for novelty is both fed and mitigated by an impulse to steal good ideas from your competition.

    What we continue to be irritated about, though, is the morally indefensible position of doing so little with so much. We don’t normally like to mention names, but here we go. Here’s what we mean: We happened to be having a cocktail a few weeks ago over at the US Bank building when we noticed that MSP’s director of advertising sales, Pat Matthews, was being feted in honor of her retirement. Now one would think that twenty-five years of service in building the powerhouse publishing empire of MSP Communications would be worth quite a lot. Indeed, in the present issue of their flagship publication, MSP crows, “We sell more ads each year than almost any other city or regional magazine in the country.” Surely much of that success is owed to the redoubtable Ms. Matthews.

    We felt a warm feeling of vicarious pride—plus we were thirsty—so we asked the bartender for a glass of the same bubbly the MSP crowd appeared to be having to toast Ms. Matthews. “Same as them!” we said with a leer. Our bartender smiled and said, “Are you sure?” We said, “Don’t make us ask twice—and damn the cost.”

    He brought a glass of sparkling apple juice, and said one was the limit—if Mr. Deep Pockets was buying, anyway.

  • Fragmented Transmission From A Ghost Satellite

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    The head running slow, churning, moving up a long, steep hill in the last hours of darkness. Already a few early birds, noisy, to keep me company.

    Here, take a look at my disaster movie, my shoebox full of footnotes, my personal wasteland. All my sleepless nights. While you are sleeping, while you are dreaming, I am still on my feet, moving from table to table with a pen in my hand, taking orders in a language I can no longer understand.

    You’d think the confusion would be condensed, but you’d be wrong. You’d think you’d eventually find your way into some kind of clearing, or perhaps even a long valley with a wide river. You’d think the middle of the night would be the mind’s Big Sky Country. Wrong again. I keep hearing astronauts in my right ear, lost, forlorn, the transmission fractured and breaking up. Sometimes their exhausted sorrow sounds almost like yodeling.

    It wasn’t an astronaut, but a truck driver who once told me, “Where there’s gasoline a fella can usually find him some pussy.” I’ve never attempted to corroborate that statement, but I have discovered that where there’s gasoline a fella can usually find him some beef jerky.

    My God, I get tired of dinosaurs, stomping all over automobiles and knocking over patio furniture with their tails. Seriously, all I’ve ever wanted is to know my shit.

    I cooked a burrito in a microwave oven. There was little pleasure involved in this procedure, very little pleasure. (“Make your own leaps.” —P. Metcalf.) Cue singing of angels. Believe me, I know a little something about neutral objects. I raise rubber children in tiny jars.

    No getting around it: you have mostly chosen. Others might find more peace, or consolation, in a revelation like that, if, in fact, you’d like to call it a revelation. They keep making the hole bigger, so you can swallow more, so you can bury more in the hole. There are moments when you can literally feel the earth tilt beneath you, your heart swaying dully in your chest like an empty bell. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to stand here and sugarcoat it. I am simply unable. I can find nothing positive whatsoever to say about recent events in the region. I’m afraid it’s the same old story: lame fucking white men, many of them grossly overweight, swinging sledge hammers.

    There it is, there’s the familiar thump of the newspaper at the front door.

    Something crippled and almost recognizable creeps towards you with the first bruise of light from the east. Come on now, kiss your fat little fable goodnight and let’s just see if it wakes up still resembling truth.

  • Lord Have Mercy

    I’m not even going to bother to try to reconstruct the haywire play-by-play from the last four games. I was intending to go back over the game logs at some point tonight, but the prospect is frankly just too exhausting at the moment. All I know for sure is that I saw more variations of ugly than you’re likely to see this side of the Deliverance wrap party. Somebody out there will know how many times the Twins had the bases loaded over that stretch, and how many runs they managed to get out of those situations. I’ll just take a wild stab for the hell of it: the Twins had the bases loaded twenty-five times and scored one run. I think that’s right.

    This I do know, though, because all I have to do is look at the boxscores: Four games, thirty-seven hits, fifteen walks, thirty-eight runners left on base, nine double plays hit into, eleven runs scored, and a 1-3 record. Folks, I know it’s a difficult game, but it’s hard to do what the Twins have been doing (or hard to not do what the Twins haven’t been doing?). Something like that.

    Look on the bright side, though. Seriously, have you looked at the pitching numbers for Johan Santana specifically, and the pitching staff in general? Johan has now struck-out thirty-seven batters while walking two. Those are Dennis Eckersley numbers, from when Eckersley was a reliever. It’s unreal. And it’s not just Santana. The entire staff has walked sixteen and struck-out ninety-four. Juan Rincon’s strikeouts to innings pitched ratio has got to be inching up there close to Santana territory. (Okay, I just looked: Rincon’s K/9 –15.00– is actually better than Santana’s –13.50.)

    I don’t know how to explain all the home runs Johan’s given up so far, other than just to remember that it’s still early, he was lousy for the first month or so last year, and the league’s got a much better idea of how he operates. There’s also the Joe Mauer factor. Henry Blanco was a very good signal caller, and the pitchers raved about him all last season. I don’t know how long it’ll take Mauer to get a good handle on the batters around the league, and maybe right now they’re calling most of the pitches from the dugout. I don’t think so, though. All I know is that if you could throw back half the homers Twins starters have allowed –and there have been a lot of two- and three-run shots– we wouldn’t even be talking about all those stranded runners and double plays.

    Well, we’d probably still be talking about them, or bitching about them, but we’d pretty much be nit-picking. I’m not going to do too much bitching tonight, however, consternated as I am, because I got an earful all night from my pal Jumbo, and I know only too well how tiresome it is to listen to somebody piss and moan. I actually got up and switched seats in the middle innings because I’d had enough of his bellowing. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it on Friday.

    Tomorrow I’ll give you the rundown on the tunes that escort each of the Twins from the on-deck circle to home plate, most of them personal selections. I’ll also, finally, assign an artist and a title to that damn song they played for Cristian Guzman the last couple years he was here. I think you know the one. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that you could hum it right now.

  • Straight From The Bedstand of MC Z-Diggedy-Dawg

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    –J.A. Whipple, early daguerreotype of the moon. February 26, 1852. From the Harvard Daguerreotype Collection.

    People who frequent low drinking resorts eight nights a week are liable to get –vulgarity says it best– they get fucked up. They are assaulted by too much truth and, at the same time, too many lies; they lose their sense of proportion, of balance; their vision of reality is chronically blurred by alcohol and elation and hangover and depression; they get manic, they are at turns garrulous and quarrelsome, their dispositions sour, they fight among themselves over imagined slights and shadowy suspicions; in the dark of their minds they brood upon mortality and, worse, upon the death of love. A dreadful affliction, all in all….

    —Ed McClanahan, Famous People I Have Known. 1986, Penguin Books

    While we ate we talked. People say that conversation is a lost art: how often I have wished it were.

    American girls are getting larger all the time, and she was a woman of the future.

    —Randall Jarrell, Pictures From An Institution. 1954, University of Chicago Press

    In the mid-centre of America a man can go blank for a long, long time. There is no community to give him life; so he can get lost as if he were in a jungle. No one will pay any attention. He can simply be as lost as if he had gone into the heart of an empty continent. A sensitive child can be lost too amidst all the emptiness and ghostliness. I am filled with terror when I think of the emptiness and ghostliness of mid-America. The rigors of conquest have made us spiritually insulated against human values. No fund of instinct and experience has been accumulated, and each generation seems to be more impoverished than the last.

    —Meridel LeSueur, “Corn Village”

    It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man’s creative powers. Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as subject as the rest of creation.

    —E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. 1973, Perennial Library

    The council, which assembled on this occasion, was conspicuous for the absence of the essential thing known among the common people as common sense. In general, we somehow don’t seem to be made for representative assemblies.

    …after organizing some charitable society for the benefit of the poor and subscribing a considerable sum, we at once gave a dinner to the prominent dignitaries of the town in honor of so laudable an undertaking and, needless to say, spend half of the subscribed funds on it; with what is left of the money we at once rent magnificent offices with heating facilities and porters for the members of the committee, and all that is left for the poor is five and a half rubles, and even over the distribution of this sum the members cannot agree.

    —Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls. 1842, Penguin Classics

    Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, most chimpanzees, in fact all that have been observed, persist in being good chimpanzees, and do not become quasi-human morons. Nevertheless I think that the average psychologist is rather longingly hoping for that chimpanzee who will disgrace his simian ancestry by adhering to more human modes of conduct.

    —Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. 1950, Avon/Discus

    What a country calls its its vital economic interests are not the same things which allow its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

    —Simone Weil, The Need For Roots. 1949, Beacon Press

  • Raise your hands if you've heard this one before

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    I’m not sure exactly why, but the election of the new Pope made me think, of course, of Alexander Pope. But then I thought a bit more of what this Pope will have to do, and that reminded me of Milton, and his objective in writing Paradise Lost.

    To millions of English majors, that objective has no doubt been: to bore the hell out of us. But Milton himself had loftier goals: “To justify the ways of God to men.” Good luck Benedict.

    OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
    Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
    Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
    With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
    Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
    Sing Heav’nly Muse,that on the secret top
    Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
    That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
    In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
    Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
    Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
    Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
    Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
    That with no middle flight intends to soar
    Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
    Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
    And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
    Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
    Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
    Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
    Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
    And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
    Illumin, what is low raise and support;
    That to the highth of this great Argument
    I may assert Eternal Providence,
    And justifie the wayes of God to men.

    If you want to continue reading the most unread poem in the history of English majordom, click here.

  • Without Delay

    It’s hard to understand the hubris that allows Tom DeLay to more or less demand all-encompassing power over every living being. We guess it comes from having a strong sense of one’s own innate divinity. Why is it so difficult for Delay and his supporters to understand the concept of checks and balances? In a nice editorial in today’s New York Times, Adam Cohen suggests that members of congress seem to believe they have the highest billing in government because they hold elective offfice, whereas federal judges are appointed more or less for life. (Never mind the cult of party, which would normally defuse this problem—Republicans have for so long genuflected at the golden calf of Ronald Reagan, it’s a wonder their adoration does not extend indefinitely to every decision and judicial appointment the Gipper ever made.)

    Any depraved high school student who manages to stay awake for ten minutes of civics class understands the simple idea: the arrogance of any one branch of government is abrogated by the arrogance of the other two, and the promise (or rather the threat) to “unset” what Congress has “set-up” (that is, the courts) is not going to come as welcome news to most red-blooded Americans. As Cohen makes clear, the present GOP monopoly will not be complete nor satisfied until it has also overrun the judiciary, and the battle-cry against “activist judges” should be translated into simpler terms—”we will have the judges and the laws that best serve our party, and opposition and dissent do not serve our party.”

    All we can say is pride goeth before the fall, and present Republican leadership’s slash-and-burn approach to politics will not only do permanent violence to the Plain People of America and their great-grandchildren, it may insure a permanent place as the minority party for another one hundred years. FDR had a war and a depression to thank for his visionary heroism. The next great president will have neo-conservatism to thank.

    You know, we fought and won a bloody war once to rid ourselves of the Royal Imperative, and despite our short memories and attentions spans, Americans tend to remember that at important historical moments.

    Newt Gingrich was just a salty-sour appetizer. Tick-tock, Mr. Delay. Tick tock.

  • The Depression Deepens

    Well, we’ve been following Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” each week, and last night they really stepped in it. The usual disclaimer at the beginning of the show might have warned not only that the show would be too violent for viewers without discretion, but that it would depict Americans committing odious, unamerican acts. See, here’s the problem—after the first few episodes, we mentioned that the show felt like a suicide note from a nation on a steep depressive decline. What we meant was this: You are either against torture, or you are for it. This is not an area that admits a lot of gray area. The cliff-hanger structure of the show has allowed the writers and producers to suggest over and over again that the ends justify the means. Well, I mean, really—if your choice is between breaking a (guilty) terrorist’s thumbs or a nuclear warhead being set off in a major American city, it’s pretty obvious what should be done, no?

    Last night, though, the show went one step further and made “Global Amnesty”—a transparent stand-in for Amnesty Internation, duh—the dupes of Marwan Habib, the evil overlord of terrorism on the show. (When one ofhis operative is caught, he calls Amnesty and dispatches a lawyer and federal marshall to prevent any, um, aggressive questioning.) We appreciated the gesture toward that yellowing old rag we call the Constituion, when the president sided with the lawyers and suggested that due process was in order—and which instantly puts Jack Bauer outside the law. But by now, we all know who the hero of this story is, and any moral qualms we might have about his M.O. evaporate in the overwhelming evidence against his nemeses.

    Now, one can feel slightly propped up by the realization that this show is really just a high-grade motion-picture comic book on steroids. But if there is something to be even more troubled about than the implication that due-rpocess, civili-rights—lovin’, glue-sniffin liberals are nothing but an impediment to justice—it is a certain aspect of the show’s intense realism.

    What we mean by that is the relative ease with which terrorists on the show have arranged just about every major attack its writers and producers could conceive after what must have been several potfuls of strong coffee. It was not enough to kidnap the Secretary of Defense and his daughter. That was a plot designed merely to overload the Internet, to allow the covert transfer of information allowing Marwan to gain access to every nuclear power plant in the country. But that was just a diversion to allow Marwan to hijack a stealth bomber to shoot down Airforce One. But that was just a convenient way to get his hands on “the football”—the president’s briefcase with all nuclear ballistics codes and locations.

    See, now taken as a quick synopsis, doesn’t that seem ridiculous? Problem is, we wonder just how unrealistic it really is. In last Sunday’s Times magazine, former CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle comments on the crossroads of intelligence and politics. She poses the interesting question: What if we caught Osama bin Laden and didn’t tell anyone? If we were really worried about security in a concrete way—preventing terrorist attacks with or without taking public credit, you know, speaking quietly and carrying a big stick— the most brilliant move would be to hold him in secrecy and let the rest of al-Qaida come looking for him. But political expediency would absolutely demand that the sitting administration crow from the highest tree in its loudest voice. We hate to be cynical about it, but it’s not hard to believe that some of the adminstration’s more enthused partisans would put the GOP ahead of the safety of Americans—half of whom are godless John Kerry lovers, after all.

    As Tom Friedman makes clear in this recent column, we should not assume that just because there has been no terrorist attack in the US since September 11th that it’s because of anything we might have done to shore up security. The present administration seems far more interested in the politics of security than the realities of security, and we sincerely hope that Friedman is wrong about the dark days ahead.